Gone Flat

I was running late this morning. I know I’m late if the school bus is going through my subdivision as I leave. If I don’t get out before it comes through, I will be even MORE late waiting for them to load up my neighbor’s 7 children. So, today I dashed out to my car and flew out of the driveway. As I headed down the street I noticed my car was really loud – like I was driving with my door open. What was all that road noise?

I pulled over and a truck behind me pulled along side to tell me my right front tire was VERY flat. No slow leak there. “So that’s what that noise was,” I said with girlish naiveté. I hadn’t left my subdivision yet, so I turned around and went back to my house very slowly (waiting, of course, for the bus to load up my neighbor’s 7 children). I made a phone call to my boss telling him I’d be late, one to my mother asking if I could ride to work with her and another to wake up DB and have him come outside to look at the car.

(Yes, the same car with the vacuum seal leak and the acceleration problem I’m ignoring.)

I might have driven twenty miles on that rim, my radio cranked up to block out the obvious. Sometimes my mind just misses the details. Had I even looked at my car, I would have noticed the tire. My mind was elsewhere.

I would have to say the same applies to my writing. I’ve mentioned that my revised partial is sitting as a paperweight in someone’s office in downtown Manhattan. That revision, with insights from the editor and the playfriends, is a far cry from the original one. The original that I thought was fine. There may have been some extra road noise, but I was bound and determined to ignore it until the editor pointed out the obvious. It needed work. Lots of work, but thank goodness they thought it was salvageable.

It was not as easy to fix my partial as it was for me to have DB take my tire in to be patched, but the results were the same. I came out with something much better than I started with. My MS had been flat, but I was too distracted to see the obvious problems. To be honest, I read my revision letter going “yep,” “yeah, I thought about that,” and “I understand what she means there,” all the way through. I knew I had a flat, I just wanted to get to work.

Obliviousness or denial – your call. Do you turn a blind eye to problems in your MS? How do you handle the obvious issues that you’re not ready to address yet? I know we’ve got more than a few tile scrubbers around here when the flow isn’t flowing.

SP